The power of boring technology

"Communications tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring," says Clay Shirky in his new book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations.

For readers of Ars Technica, technologies like online forums, blogs, mailing lists, Meetup, and Wikipedia are old hat. We've been using them—and arguing about them—for the better part of a decade. But Shirky contends that the really big impacts are still to come, as these technologies spread to our less geeky relatives, friends, and neighbors. As the Internet radically reduces the costs of collective action for everyone, it will transform the relationship between ordinary individuals and the large, hierarchical institutions that were a dominant force in 20th-century societies.

A scribe's noble calling

One of the most talked-about consequences of the rise of digital communications technologies is the turmoil these have unleashed in the publishing industries. Newspapers and magazines, book and music publishers, and Hollywood studios are all feeling squeezed as the printing and distribution services they provide become less and less valuable.

Shirky points out that this turmoil is not new; indeed, the printing press itself unleashed similar turmoil when it was first introduced to Europe in the 15th century. For centuries, scribes had held an honored place in society, propagating society's written culture at a time when the vast majority of people were illiterate. But the printing press suddenly called the scribes' privileged position into question by drastically reducing the cost of creating books. Suddenly, the scribes' time-honored skills were a lot less valuable than they used to be.

Shirky tells the amusing story of an Abbot named Johannes Trithemius. In 1492—a half-century after Gutenberg's first printing press—he wrote a treatise on the superiority of the scrivener's life to the vulgarity of movable type. But Trithemius had a problem: he wanted his book to reach a broad audience, and that would have been impossible if he had relied on his fellow scribes to reproduce the book by hand. So he had the book printed. As Shirky puts it, "The content of the Abbot's book praised the scribes, while its printed form damned them."

But Trithemius's intellectual descendants are with us today. Last fall, Shirky critiqued a professional literary critic named Sven Birkerts, who wrote an op-ed for the Boston Globe lamenting the fact that too many people were writing book reviews for one another instead of reading book reviews written by himself and his friends. Just as the technological limitations of pen and ink gave scriveners a privileged place in medieval society, so the limitations of 20th-century media technologies conferred a privileged position on the relatively small circle of journalists, critics, musicians, actors, directors, and authors fortunate enough to have access to them. And just as the printing press democratized access to the written word, the Internet is democratizing publishing.

These changes will not lead to a perfectly egalitarian media world or the end of professional content creation. While 20th-century publishing technologies certainly enhanced the fame of those lucky enough to gain access to them, Shirky argues that fame is an intrinsic characteristic of complex societies. What will be different, though, is that there will no longer be a sharp distinction between a small number of professional producers and a large number of passive consumers.

Every content consumer is a potential producer, with the entire wired world as a potential audience. No longer does publication require the purchase of expensive printing presses, broadcast stations, or 35mm cameras. With these economic barriers removed, publishing is limited only by time and ability. The media marketplace will contain everything anyone cares enough to create, not just the few things that the limitations of 20th-century media technologies made profitable to distribute.

Timothy B. Lee
Timothy covers tech policy for Ars, with a particular focus on patent and copyright law, privacy, free speech, and open government. His writing has appeared in Slate, Reason, Wired, and the New York Times. Emailtimothy.lee@arstechnica.com//Twitter@binarybits